Sunday, October 16, 2011

As you can see, a nice piece of bullet-hell... just the music isn't as catchy as the one from Aleste (*sneeks in old-school gaming reference*).

In totally unrelated news, the guys (and gals?) from the open-source MMORPG Planeshift have started a small PR project called "Free Game Alliance" to promote theirs and other high profile open-source games. You can read some comments from our forums about it here... but all the nagging aside, I sure hope something good comes out of this!
Oh and Planeshift itself seems to be coming along quite nicely also... hadn't checked their progress in ages...

Another project whose developers show some serious long term commitment, is AlienArena, which just got a major update to version 7.52 and is now also easily available via the Desura Linux beta ;) Check out the change-log here.

Sunday, October 09, 2011

So a while ago we were asked on our forums why we never featured any games done with the open-source Visual Novel engine Ren'Py... which I pretty much dismissed in my mind with "prfff... those are not games anyways" :D
But well... a small competition over at the very nice Linux Gaming News blog asking which game engine actually had the most Linux compatible (and often at least freeware) games released so far, got me thinking about this again as with literally hundreds of games available on-line, we shouldn't simply dismiss this genre outright, I guess.

Luckily, I do watch Anime from time to time, so I wasn't completely "out of the loop" so to say and thought "if tentacle p*** didn't kill me, I am up for anything" (except for 4chan's /b/ :D ). And at least in Japan, Visual Novels are a pretty big thing, with "next-gen" console releases, high quality movie adaptions and millions of players/readers (as an rather good example "Stein's Gate" could be mentioned).

However Visual Novels do have a certain prejudice attached to them, that most are all about school-girl dating sims or worse e.g. so called "eroge" surprisingly often also meant for a female audience, including boy-boy scenes o_o
And after digging into the scene a bit, I have to admit those prejudices are somewhat correct *slowly wanders off and wonders why he even bothered*

But, that doesn't mean there aren't some good/interesting ones (for example this one), and the Ren'Py engine allows for some pretty awesome interactive storytelling (also on your Android powered device)... so lets not judge a tool by some of its user.
Besides that... it is perfectly feasible for a one man (or woman) team to succeed in creating a great Visual Novel, which can't be said for most other game genres. So if you have an awesome story to tell, and writing a book isn't your thing... well maybe making a Visual Novel is (the programming involved is rather simple... no worries ;) ). Interested? Well head over to the LemmaSoft Visual Novel development forums and dive right into this rather strange sub-culture :p

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

GunFu Deadlands, a quick, atmospheric retro keys+mouse top-down shooter for Win/Osx/Lin has been updated (1.01) to run with LÖVE 0.7.2 and the development codebase moved from Subversion to Git.

The game plays perfectly fine on a ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook running Arch Linux 32bit. A previous version (don't remember which) was extremely slowly. I can't tell whether the playable speed is thanks to improvements of GFD, love2d or perhaps the drivers for my netbook but if you've had performance trouble with the game in the past, try again!

Note: if you get shot in the title screen and start the game before respawning, you will be able to walk through walls.

This is the first update of GunFu Deadlands since the 1.0 release 22 months ago.

Just for your interest, I made some measurements and it seems that the speed increase is indeed dramatic: 55% faster.

I computed the mean FPS rate by measuring the time it takes to render 1000 frames in-game and dividing 1000 by this number. The formula (FPS_faster_version - FPS_slower_version) / FPS_slower_version is what produced this 55%.